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We spent some time this summer going through our existing ground rules, debating them and refining them. Here are our new site ground rules, and here's an overview of what we came up with.

These changes will be followed by some yet-to-be-named additions to site functionality.

To recap:

We added an introduction to the site ground rules, which includes some tips and recommendations about how to get along on our site.

We added "baiting" to the third ground rule, "Personal attacks, taunts, baiting, name-calling, and threats have no place in civil discussion. We also added to the third ground rule was a bit about ad hominem attacks.

We condensed several rules into rule number seven, "Cutting and pasting chunks from other sites is usually bad. So is infringing on other sites’ copyrights. So is making modifications to cut and pasted chunks, and then posting those."

We added some clarification to the ninth rule, "Take advantage of our private messaging functionality."

We combined two rules into rule 13, "Be yourself, and be truthful."

We combined many rules under the fifteenth rule, "The Common Courtesy rules."